Schematic Approach to Information Services Reconfiguration

Abstract

Information system change is concerned with deliberate modifications to an organization's technical and organizational subsystems that deal with information. Changes result in adjustments being made to the configuration of information systems that could have an impact on the operations of those systems. This paper examines the problem of interference between old configuration activities, new configuration activities and reconfiguration activities that occur due to overlapping modes. The paper proposes a novel form of depicting and solving the problem based on a flow-based conceptualization in which a configuration can be viewed as a system of flow systems organized architecturally, described by their internal flows, and connected by external flows and triggering. This method of diagramming is applied to a complex case study involving the reconfiguration of an office workflow for order processing described in BPMN. The diagrams resulting from this method and the BPMN diagrams are then examined side by side. Accordingly, the conclusion is that a new high-level representation seems more systematic as a foundation for building a conceptual schema of business processes.